Gaming Daily A-Z

Google's Summer of Code , is an annual sponsorship of programmers to improve selected open-source programs (or games :D ). This year, quite a few interesting FOSS game projects got accepted (again) and one being our very own friends of the SuperTuxKart project. Read more about their role as a mentoring organization here . So how about applying as a participant yourself and helping out this great FOSS game? You can also browse other accepted mentoring projects here , if SuperTuxKart isn't your thing. Other notable FOSS game (engine) projects accepted are: Battle for Wesnoth WorldForge (Hosting also Ryzom Core & CEGUI) Crystal Space OGRE3D Blender 3D Nice summer of coding ahead :)

Matt Raykowski , aka sfb, is a community herder for the Ryzom Core project and Summer of Code mentor. Some people may not be familiar with Google's Summer of Code. Annually Google hosts two programs: Summer of Code and Code In. Google Code In (aka GCI) is a contest for 13-18 year olds to engage them in open source that features a variety of tasks and projects for them to complete for points. Google Summer of Code (aka SoC or GSoC) is a program to encourage college students to participate in open source development. It is a 3 month long project that pays USD$2500 per evaluation period - there is a mid-term and final evaluation. You can find a detailed timeline on their site and a complete list of organizations . The student application period begins on March 26th, 2012 and ends on April 6th, 2012. The actual programming portion of the project is between May 21st, 2012 and August 20th, 2012. In years past Google hasn't given a lot of love to open source games in its Summer of ...

In a bold (desperate?) move the guys behind the nearly completely FOSS but still commercial MMORPG Ryzom have decided to make their game free-to-play , but with some smaller limitations (which are supposed to make you buy a subscription at some later point of course ;) ). Ryzom running on Linux We mentioned it before, but Ryzom also runs fine under Linux (as seen above), and check out their developers page , and art asset repository if you are thinking about contributing. Personally I feel the game shows it's age a bit too much on the desktop platform, but a mobile version (lets say on Maemo and Android) could really shine and attract a lot of users. But now is your chance to try it out as long as you like ;)

Zero-K: Zero-K is the reboot of Spring RTS game Complete Annihilation, with aims to distance itself from the TA IP that has plagued Spring games, and just generally be better in every way :) It comes with a revamped UI, multiple specialist commander units to play as, and a single faction instead of the traditional 2. The team is also providing a set of web services such as map and mission lists to enhance the experience, and maybe we'll even see the resurgence of Planet Wars, the awesome persistent galactic RTS that was running a while back IrrRPG Builder IrrRPG Builder looks like a promising 3D RPG IDE. So far, it features a terrain editor, drag and drop object placement, and scriptable using Lua. There's a set of tutorials to get you started, and comes with enough content to play around with; the scriptable object system along with template scripts make it really beginner friendly. The built-in script validator could use a bit of work (doesn't detect undefined functi...

I* joined PARPG to work on game interaction (controls and GUI). This decision was made after taking a look at some projects and talking with their members about what tasks are available. Now I want to tell you about the 'open source jobs' available out there. Radakan (RPG) is currently a solo project that uses the Python 3D engine Panda3D . Project lead Taldor would like help with the game design, GUI design, Writing (dialog & quests) and content creation (creating and converting models, managing the content pipeline). Warning: Radakan's website is currently down, best way to get in contact is irc.freenode.net#radakan . CubeCreate (FPS + Editor) will be a Lua-driven Sauerbraten-based engine. It could use some design help for editor accessibility improvements and thoughts on asset management (model/texture import) while the developers port to Lua. 0 AD (RTS) has a a well-compiled list of tasks. Megaglest (RTS) would like to have somebody find more players for the g...

We need contributors, contributors, contributors to misquote a famous internet meme ;) So if you want to be a new author writing wacky (or wicked) articles here on FreeGamer, contact us! Don't let this Blog die! And hey it's a good excuse to be lazy and not work on actual open-source games :D FOSS game news So what kind of gaming related news have piled up in my list during the last month (yes it has been nearly a month since goat's post :( )? Freeroid recently got a major update, bringing it up to version 0.14 . Another major update was given to us by the great Hedgewars team, so who needs worms if he can have hedgehogs? They also make better splashes under my car...*hust*. Forget what I just said, FreeGamer minion! Concentrate on the news I bring regarding the the FOSS MMORPG Ryzom . You might remember that this game has gone free as in freedom (but not as in beer) some time ago, and besides various improvements , it now resulted in a working Linux client . So go and t...

Ryzom has been released under AGPLv3 for server, client and "content creation tools" and BY-SAv3 for 17463 png image files and 7553 max 3d model files (see ). The 3D format is problematic, as .max is a proprietary format, but art is also available in the NeL shape format in ryzom's media browser (maybe not all of it, I'm not sure). "Porting the art" is one of the tasks for which Ryzom will welcome developer support. Finishing porting to GNU/Linux is another goal and I'm sure there will be a little more coverage about the game here on Free Gamer and on other blogs once it runs. :) (4 MB 24x24 preview of about 14000 of 17463) I think most ground textures I saw were rather small (128x128) but of high quality and also include to-transparency alpha-blend tiles that are helpful for transitions between ground types. There are also in-game icons and GUI elements. Here are the most popular resolutions, if you're curious: files resolution 5493 256x256 ...